My 3 weirdest Android apps that are still available on Google Play
I have made some embarrassingly weird apps on a whim over the last few years, and these three are at the top of that list but yet somehow remain published on the Google Play store and available to download by anyone with an Android phone:
This one wins for sheer absurdity. It’s like a magic 8-ball app (you know where you shake the 8-ball and a little triangle dice at the bottom gives you a yes/no answer), but rather than shaking an 8-ball for a randomly generated answer instead you can ask each of the planet’s in our solar system (like the ancient gods, you know right?) If you want to ask the council’s advice more than once a day though, you gotta watch an ad ha! Also, there’s a new-age style quiz where you can answer 10 questions and get a personality-type rating and a tarot reading. It’s actually all like, really super useful stuff 🙄
One day I hope to make a similar app, but where you ask cartoon caricatures of famous historical characters and/or mythical figures for random advice.
2.
This one comes in second by virtue of the OVERWHELMING ANIMATED RAINBOWS that are all over it. This is a perfect example of a young developer getting too much power too quickly, and using it in a completely irresponsible way. It’s a collection of mini games that are simple but really hard and frustrating. And there’s cute pixel art aliens and animals, and 3D kitten that doesn’t do anything but has cute idle animations and you can change it’s color by tapping on it. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure I ever knew what my final vision for this app was, but it’s got to be something close to where it is now since instead of making the obvious design decision to tone down the rainbows I instead went to great lengths to implement a no-rainbow mode which really just replaces the most obnoxious rainbows with black and white graphics but leaves key UI elements (like the player) untouched. Sigh…
My son really likes Anachron’s Arcade though so that’s cool, but still sometimes I look back on my early projects and think wtf was I thinking.
Which leads me to this next and final weird project…
3.
This is a really simple prototype that I made years ago of a “magic charm” app where you could select different charms and, presumably, immediately benefit from them in your everyday life. It was a joke (hence the name), but I took it a little far by getting a Wiccan spell cast on in for a couple bucks from a lady on Fiverr (yes you can actually buy that). Then I put out a press release explaining the app’s recent blessing. I thought it was all pretty funny at the time; no offense to my friendly Wiccan neighbors.
Turns out the joke’s on e because I swear that spell might have worked… as four years later I am still using this app; it’s basically never left my phone. I found that when I chose a charm, it really did feel like I was getting blessed by it in my life. I think I understand how it works on a conscious/subconscious level, but it’s more fun to think of it as a bit of a mystery 👻
So now I’m taking the joke even farther, and have re-engineered and re-branded that app as Charming App mindfulness, built under a new software brand — Charming Ape.
Now it’s more useful, and more fun to use, than ever. And although I’m a bit self-conscious talking about Charming App given it’s unusually embarrassing origins and the fact that it may now qualify as even weirder than the apps on this list, well here we are. Try it out and see for yourself just how weird it is.
